It is just not possible for me to listen to more than 10 minutes of Def Leppard without tears of boredom streaming down my face. I tried. I came to this album with an open mind, ready to embrace it for all its corny pop-metal excesses, but I’m about ready to concede defeat.

It’s not that the music has no redeeming value. There are guitar riffs and melodies and all the things you expect to find in a rock song, but they’re like candy hidden inside a compost heap, and then when you finally find them and scrape off the rotting chunks of half-eaten lettuce, they turn out to be butterscotch. The best tracks on Hysteria are actually the power ballads, but that’s like winning a Miss Leper Colony beauty pageant.

People go on about how tasteless and macho and stupid hair metal is, but I can’t even be bothered to think about that. Maybe it’s a salient question for something like mainstream rap, which can actually be entertaining, but this? Who can even listen closely enough to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” to make out the lyrics without feeling like they’re having sex with one of Ramesses II’s mummified slave girls? The songs are so long (averaging over 5 minutes each) and so unenergetic that the album just drags like a motherfucker, plain and simple.